


Identity Struggle

by wastefulreverie



Series: Angst Week 2018 [2]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Angst, Gen, Identity Issues, Insecurity, ghost hunger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 18:52:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17229344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wastefulreverie/pseuds/wastefulreverie
Summary: Danny's comfort with his ghostly identity starts to waver when he learns more about the gross little details of his other half.





	Identity Struggle

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Diddly's Angst Week back in August.

After the accident, Danny realized there was a lot he took for granted. At first, he was mostly scared about the fact that he was half-dead now and was literally falling through solid objects all of the time, but after he got over that initial shock, he was faced with many questioning moments. And every question that he found himself asking, compromised his vision of his own morality and certainty, always bringing him back to the fact that on some level, he didn't understand what he was.

It was a weird way to live. Going between two fake identities everyday for so long, that Danny lost sight of who was real. He wasn't a ghost or a human, he wasn't even both. He was some kind of hybrid, doomed to keep his real self locked away, because if he didn't, he'd be vulnerable to the world. He had no choice; he either had to play pretend, or be experimented on.

Pretending sure seemed like the more appealing choice, but in those unsure moments, he felt like maybe experimentation would be better. At least in that scenario, someone could answer all his queries about _what_ he really was.

That's probably why Vlad didn't seem to have as nearly as many insecurity issues – he was a scientist, so he probably experimented on himself and other ghosts a long time ago. Danny, on the other, was left to figure out the weird things about himself the hard way.

The first thing he noticed wasn't very long after the accident, seeing as it was definitely one of the more obvious quirks about his body. Anybody could notice his irregular body temperature just by touching him, after all. Most people would probably just write it off as him being cold to the touch because of the weather outside, or the air conditioning. But three days after the accident, Danny tested himself with a thermometer and realized that his internal temperature was about 88 °F. In a Google search, he was horrified to find out that hypothermia occurs when the human body temperature goes below 95 °F.

Besides his powers, that was his first real clue about how much he had been changed inside his own body, biologically speaking. So at the time, the fact that his body temperature was ten degrees lower than normal, absolutely terrified him. By the time he accepted that he was partially a ghost, his abnormalities stopped scaring him, but that didn't mean that they still didn't freak him the hell out.

When he got into ghost hunting, he started getting more wounds. So that was around the time he noticed that as Phantom, his blood was green. Otherwise known as ectoplasm, as classified by his parents. He was okay with that fact, after all, Danny was a ghost, and ghosts were supposed to be made of ectoplasm. It didn't bother him until he cut himself in Sam's basement one day, and realized that he didn't just bleed ectoplasm in ghost form, but the green goop was also mixed in with his human blood.

That was the day he realized he wasn't just a human who had the power to turn into a ghost, he was a hybrid. That was the beginning of his doubts. Because before, he had seen himself as both human and ghost. But as hybrid, that meant he was something new. Something even more _wrong_.

There were little things he started realizing. Things that he had seen before, things he had noticed before, but had never put them into context. Such as the fact that he didn't really need to breathe, at all. In either form. _Ever_.

He'd read his parents articles and found out that the ectoplasm inside of him acted as a substitute for providing oxygen because it worked as a multipurpose building block inside ectoentities. He didn't realize how eerie his lack of breathing was until he and Jazz slept next to each other in the RV and she made a comment about how still he was in his sleep, and how she wasn't sure if he was even breathing. She already knew his secret, but he didn't have the strength to tell her that he actually wasn't breathing in his sleep.

Another thing he realized, unfortunately in science class, in front of many other people, was that his heartbeat was much, _much_ slower than a human's. It was one of the more obvious changes to his body, but he hadn't found much need to focus on his heartbeat since it was an involuntary function. But according to the measurement Sam did, he had roughly 20 bpm. She wrote down a safe looking number on their biology worksheet, and never mentioned it again. He didn't know if he appreciated or loathed the fact that she didn't want to talk about how innately screwed up he was on the inside.

(In a later conversation with Vlad, he found out that the reason his heartbeat is so slow is because the ectoplasm in his blood is thinner than blood, giving the heart less effort to circulate. Vlad didn't elaborate much.)

It was hard to adjust to those kinds of mentalities, and to know how different he was from everyone else, while maintaining his facade for his parents and peers. Similarly, it was especially difficult to keep his human traits from ghost hunters as Phantom.

He spent so many moments trying to keep everything together, hoping that in gym class, nobody would realize that he didn't sweat. That he physically _couldn't_ perspire for some reason. Then, at the same time, he had to keep his reflexes in check, making sure he didn't accidentally shoot an ectoblast at a dodgeball, or go intangible when somebody accidentally stepped on the heel of his tennis shoes when he was pretending to run slow.

He spent his trips to the dentist fretting about his glow-in-the-dark saliva, praying that the lights would stay on the entire time someone else's hands were prying inside of his mouth. There was also no way to explain the slightly sharper edge to his canines that would become his fangs once he completed puberty (thankfully, Clockwork had been merciful enough to warn him).

Even when the stress of pretending to be so fucking normal all of the time overwhelmed him, he couldn't cry without his tears glowing neon green.

And then there was the fact that after his first Death Day (an already morose event), he learned the hard way that he would have to start eating purified ectoplasm to keep his core from falling apart. Apparently, since he had grown and cultivated his powers, he wasn't strong enough to sustain him on just human food anymore, so he had to start harvesting ghost food. Which was conflicting, and disgusting, especially since the process of eating ectoplasm brought out an unwanted primal side of him that he just wanted to bury.

Whenever he got weak, he had to stop himself from trying to kill other ghosts for their ectoplasm, because his instincts couldn't differentiate sentient ectoplasm from non-sentient ectoplasm. He'd only ever killed once... and thankfully, it was only an animal ghost. He swore to himself, that he'd never do it again, so that meant he had to keep a thermos of plain ectoplasm with him at all times so he wouldn't jump on the nearest blob ghost. Because he couldn't control himself when he was hungry.

( _It’s my fault I’m like this, it’s all my fault that I go crazy because I have to eat inhuman things... ghost blood, a supernatural chemical...._ )

The fact that this feeding process was all built into him, made him sick sometimes. That maybe deep down... he _is_ destined to be a monster.

One of the last things that he noticed about what had changed about himself was that while he had outstanding healing abilities, that neither his hair or fingernails grew. If he got a haircut, his hair would grow, but it would never surpass the length of how long it was during the accident. He had accidentally made that discovery when his Mom asked him if he had gotten a haircut without telling her, since she hadn't had to take him in over eighteen months. The fingernail thing was about the same, he had just coincidentally noticed that they didn't grow.

Even through all the different struggles in his life, he was always finding out more, delving and creating more existential crises. Sometimes they got resolved, but usually they just followed him around, whispering to him at night until he was soaked in the glowy green tears that he hated.

Keeping a hybrid identity was devastatingly hard. And there were definitely moments he didn't know what or who he was. It always brought him to the thought... that maybe, it would be a little easier... to just chose one.

That made sense, right?

 


End file.
